Poetry Month (Neglected)

It is April. It is Poetry Month. Last year at this time, I declared that I would post a poem every day for the next poetry month. It didn't happen. I didn't forget the month but I certainly forgot the resolution. I offer this poem as an introduction to the Festival of Faith and Writing that I attended last week. I also offer this as an introduction to my reconsideration of prayer: or rather, reconsidering my attitude and practice of it which is nothing like I have begun to realize it should be. Scott Cairns, the poet here, was a keynote speaker at the festival. He also gave a reading of some of his work, of which this was one that I have not gotten out of my head since.

Possible Answers to Prayer
By Scott Cairns

Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,

relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.

Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.

Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.

Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—

these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.